@paulsanders My kids are too young for me to answer your question (though I have wondered the same), and I think I got my first computer (as far as I can remember) in like 7th grade (so 2001-ish).

I did want to comment though that I think iPads are really much more powerful than a lot of people give them credit for. I’ve posted recently about how good they are with stage manager and external monitor support in replicating a “real computer” with respect to multi-tasking and windowed apps (given you have an M1-enabled iPad Pro). Though not EVERY workload is natively accessible on modern iPad hardware, most things are. There are IDE’s, photo/video editing software, Remote Desktop, tools for Git, Interpreters (e.g. JS, Python, etc…), Swift playgrounds, and more! If you really really need more than that you could even just get yourself an AWS account and SSH into a traditional OS and play around with it directly from the iPad. You get all this in a package that has great battery life, never has a loud fan, can sport a cellular connection, has all the power of the vast library of iOS/iPad apps, and is extremely portable.

All this said, what are you envisioning for your kids in terms of what they could learn on a “full machine”? Powershell/Bash? Compiled languages? Virtualizing Linux and doin’ stuff? I keep some “real computers” around for various things I do in the infosec space but have started to move 99% of my daily compute to an iPad for all the reasons I mentioned. Cheers!